Perhaps its biggest since Bernays was a boy. This has been caused by a fundamental revaluation of the equity value of the industry itself. WPP, for instance, has fallen in capital value from £20bn at its peak to as little as £3bn. At first, some tried to say this change was cyclical. Change the CEO and cut costs and everything would recover. But in fact, the change turned out to be structural. The value is not coming back. At WPP, they changed the CEO twice and it got worse. Both were talented and experienced people. Both were unable to address the fundamental problem that controlling the P&L is so much harder when you don’t control the balance sheet as well.
Over the last forty years, our profession was turned into a giant equity Ponzi scheme which worked as a brilliant wealth creator for outside shareholders right up to the point when it didn’t. When the profession started to ask for some of the wealth back to retrain, restructure and develop a whole new approach, the Gnomes of Zurich were nowhere to be seen. The CEOs of holding companies are now smashing brands together and stripping them of the very investment that made them unique and distinctive in the first place. Now the profession is faced with a whole load of cut-and-shut brands which have very little in common save their ownership. Clients and colleagues are likely to be sceptical of the value add. Will there be more competition? No. Will there be more jobs? Unlikely.
Meanwhile, our professional world continues to spin through time and space on a trajectory driven by technical and cultural change. In short, it’s become so much harder to get attention from anyone for anything at any time unless you have everything coordinated to that very end. Even then with everything working perfectly, the oxygen is still sucked out of the room by financially incentivised calumny. You can simply make more money on social media with lies than you can truth. You get bigger audiences and greater engagement because lies are just more interesting.
There are two views emerging about what’s next.
The first group are like Charlton Heston in the final scene of Planet of the Apes (1968) doomed to beat their anguish into the sand repeating “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Stuck in a type of Kubler Ross response of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Pregnant with irrelevance, many will slink away to sheds or occupy themselves on The Times and Daily Mail comment sections picking a fight with someone they don’t know. A few of the even more bitter will join an ever-splintering array of right-wing political parties looking for someone to blame.
There are many commentators with apocalyptic views of the change in technology. They can be summarised as: “In the AI revolution, we are the horses.” Comparisons with Terminator 2 are common. But we hear this in every technical iteration. In the 1970s, word processors (as they were called then) were foretold to remove all office jobs. In fact, they created them. Similarly with PCs in the 1980s, the internet in 1990s, the network, the cloud, etc. The rule is that technology is attracted to high wages.
The second group are those that can see what comes next – a new shining city on the hill, a place not just populated by PR people but with whole arrondissements of paid media, organic social, GEO, events and experiential within the citadel. Inside this ecosystem will be the new engine rooms of client growth. These will be places which are situationally fluent and join the dots. They understand that marketing is like the fingers on a hand. To be useful all fingers need to work dexterously together. The budgets in each function might be smaller, but joined together. There is real financial opportunity.
This new world is faster moving, more technical and almost entirely tactical where windows of opportunity will open and close regularly, where teams will need to cross borders which are both vertical, geographic and service-based. PR people will need to understand search and paid and social and and and and.
Content will need to be optimised at speed in a multi-modal environment. Each channel’s content can have similarities but will need to be optimised. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) search will upend marketing and expose the great lie that humans have no future. If there’s one thing AI can recognise clearly, it’s AI. It will know to prioritise human content. Nothing is weirder than humans. They can tell you what Beethoven’s Fifth smells like. They can tell you that love is not just a temporary suspension of critical faculties.
It’s one thing to have the vision. It’s another to finance it because it will require patience. These new leaders will need to take our industry backwards before going forward. They will need to move their boardroom focus to professional client value first and shareholder capital value second. Of all the new technical skills to be learned in this new world, the old lessons might be the harder for the holding companies to learn. This is why independence suddenly matters again. The old dogs won’t learn the new tricks. But the new ones just might.
